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© AAPRefugees and migrants disembark from a dinghy after their arrival from the Turkish coast to the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos.
Greece is reporting that a boat carrying some 20 migrants capsized this morning off the Greek island of Kos, leaving nine migrants dead. Two of the victims were children aged seven and 14. Seven people were rescued.

"The Hellenic Coast Guard has recovered nine bodies, but four others may be missing and search operations are continuing,'' said Kelly Namia, an IOM Athens spokesperson.

Tuesday's tragedy brings to at least 562 the number of migrant and refugee fatalities in the Eastern Mediterranean this year. It brings to 3,515 the total of all migrant and refugee fatalities across all sea-borne routes to Europe in 2015.

IOM notes that the nearly 600 drownings off the coasts of Greece and Turkey so far this year equal the total number of all deaths in the Mediterranean in 2013. This year's death toll already has surpassed the 3,279 that IOM's Missing Migrants project recorded for all of 2014.

Migrant flows from Turkey to the Greek islands have remained high over the past two weeks with over 70,000 migrants and refugees arriving in Greece since the beginning of November, according to IOM estimates.

The highest monthly number of arrivals in Greece this year was in October, when 214,000 people arrived on Greece's beaches. This compares to 31,318 in June, 65,998 in July, 108,248 in August and 147,671 in September.

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Mediterranean Arrivals and Fatalies
Recent weeks have also seen a shift away from the small, plastic boats used by smugglers during the calmer summer months to larger, wooden fishing vessels. These can carry 100 people at a time.

According IOM's Early Warning Information Sharing Network, which covers Greece and the Western Balkans, the number people crossing Greece's border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) in the first ten days of November decreased by 30 per cent compared to the previous ten days, when 66,200 crossings were recorded.

This was largely due to the strikes on shipping routes which stopped migrants leaving the islands for the mainland. But the Idomeni transit camp at the border is still operating beyond its capacity.

According to IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) Flow Monitoring System for the period 2-9 November, 51 per cent of the migrants crossing the border were adult males, 18 per cent women and 31 per cent children. The majority claimed to be Syrians, followed by Afghans and Iraqis.